Re: Unilang: the Grammar

En réponse à Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>:

>
> I don't know how my language works.  I need more investigation. :-(
>
We all do, except those who are good enough to have worked on the same language
for decades.

> > BTW, is Chinese as strict as Japanese when it comes to choose between
> "come" and
> > "go", or is it more liberal like English or French?
>
> Hmm.  What do you mean?  Like using `go' not for the mere action but
> for the result?
>
Not exactly :) .

>
>    wo3 lai2 le0   tai2-wan1.
>    I   go   PERF  Taiwan.
>    (PERF is an aspect marker for a completed action but a non-completed
> result)
>    I've come to Taiwan.
>
> I hope I made no mistakes...
>
> ?? Or was the question about something completely different? :-)
>
Indeed. If you look at your last example, Chinese uses "go" while English uses
"come". What I meant is that in Japanese, the use of "go" and "come" is highly
dependent on the position of the subject (IIRC). For instance, if someone is in
the garden of his house, explaining what he did two hours ago, he will say "I
went in the house", never "I came in the house", because he's not in the house
anymore, while in English both sentences are grammatical, depending on what you
want to focus on. With the last example you give, it seems that Chinese works
like Japanese in this respect.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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